It's official! Fastest mile on a climbing wall (male) record

 Guinness has just approved my record from July for fastest mile on an indoor climbing wall (male), officially at 1:42:57.95. For technical details and links to video, see my writeup from July.

Thinking about this made me realize just how much this was a team effort. I am grateful to everyone who made this possible, especially:

• My family for encouragement and patience with me over the summer as I trained for this.
• Benjamin Sadler doing the official measurements of the route, correcting for the angle of inclination.
• Mitchell Minyard and Libby Regnerus for being witnesses for the route measurement.
• Madelyn Hayden, Dominic Pruss and Gabriella Williams for being in charge of my safety during the attempt and/or outside-of-regular-Rock-hours training sessions.
• Rock staff for watching out for my safety during regular hours, for extending the route so that 112 climbs would be enough for a mile, and constant encouragement.
• Rich Eva and Libby Regnerus for spending 1¾ hours of their Saturday holding stopwatches to provide an official time.
• Mitchell Minyard and Gabriella Williams for witnessing the attempt and working hard to log the start and end times of each of 112 climbs. 
• Gym management staff Rachel Burduroglu, Zac Huston and Cody Schrank for much encouragement, practical help, patience with many requests, and especially allowing me to use the facility outside of hours.
• The audience (notably including President Linda Livingstone and First Gentleman Brad Livingstone) for their great encouragement.
• All the members of the Baylor rock climbing community for being such a welcoming community over the past eight years, and having taught me pretty much all I know about climbing.
• Baylor Moody Media Lab for lending me equipment for recording the attempt.
• And Guinness World Records for patiently answering all my nitpicking questions and taking the time to review a massive amount of evidence in a fair and trustworthy way.

A second indoor climbing world record

On July 15, 2023, I set (still uncertified) my second indoor world climbing record: fastest vertical mile (male), doing 112 climbs, at 14.4 meters each, in a total of 1 hour 42 minutes and 58 seconds (continuous time, including descents and breaks; descents do not count towards the mile). The official best time was Andrew Dahir's 1 hour 51 minutes and 37.5 seconds. I am still working on preparing all the materials for submission to Guinness. [Later note: The record has since been officially certified.]

This was a fastest-time for fixed distance (one mile) record. In December, I got a longest-distance (about a kilometer) for a fixed-time (one hour) record. The video below shows the first and last climbs at normal speed and runs the middle 110 climbs at 30X.

I am grateful to Baylor Recreation for all the encouragement I have received, and to the volunteers who made this possible (two timekeepers, two witnesses, two additional safety officers).

Here are some details:

• I am incredibly impressed with Andrew Dahir who had set both of the records in one day! There is no way I would have the endurance for that.
• My vertical speed was 938 meters per hour, somewhat lower than the 1014 meters per hour of my December record, but I had to keep it up for a longer time. Still, I think I was less tired this time: the lower pace compensated for the greater distance.
• The route was a 5.6. 
• Unlike in my previous record, an auto-belay was used.
• I started by doing 12 climbs at a slightly higher pace than I could keep up for the full length, followed by a  minute break, followed by ten sets of ten, with about 1.5-2 minute breaks in between. 
• I got a cramp in the upper right thigh around climb #100, and had to rely more on upper body for the remainder.
• I had a pacing sheet with dual target times both for beating the record by about 1.5 minutes and for beating the record by about 5 minutes. I consistently stayed ahead of both.
• I wore my comfy 5.10 lace-up Anasazi shoes (pinks).
• Mid-way I ducked into the storage room to change into a dry T-shirt.
• I did a lot of short practices with 1-5 climbs at maximum pace (which I wouldn't be able to keep up much longer) to get my muscle memory of all the moves.
• I did three full-length practices starting around May. The first one was slightly slower than Dahir's time. The second was about two minutes ahead of the record, and the third about five.
• I did one mid-length practice about a week ahead, where I unofficially beat my December one hour record.
• To avoid mishaps with video evidence, I had five cameras pointed at the event. Guinness rules require slow motion footage to be available for one-mile events. That makes sense for a run, but is surprising for a nearly two-hour climb, and to satisfy this requirement one of the cameras was a GoPro capturing at 120fps.

Because Guinness wanted the witnesses to log the individual time of each climb, I have a nice graph of how long each ascent took. I started a little faster, slowed down towards the end. The average ascent was 36 seconds. The fastest was 26 seconds (#1) and the slowest was 50 seconds (#111).

 

Guinness World Record: one hour indoor climbing distance

My one-hour 1013.7 meter climbing attempt from December has just been certified by Guinness.

A new world record

[April, 2023 update: This record has been accepted by Guinness. I wonder how long it will last.]

And now for something not very philosophical. Today, in front of two witnesses and two timekeepers and with the help of Levi Durham doing an amazing feat of belaying me for an hour, I beat the Guinness World Record in greatest vertical distance climbed in one hour on an indoor climbing wall. The previous record was 928.5m and I did 1013.7m (with about half a minute to spare). On Baylor's climbing wall, this involved 67 climbs divided into sets of 10 (the last was 7), with about a minute of rest between sets (the clock kept on running during the rest).

Technical notes:

• The top of the wall is 15.13 meters vertically from the ground (as measured by a geology grad student), at 3.5 degree slab.
• I trained for about three months, not very heavily. In training did two unofficial full-length practice runs, and in each I beat the previous record: in the first one I got 947.1 meters and in the second I got 1004.5, so I was pretty confident I could beat the 928.5 meters on the official attempt (though I was still pretty nervous). I also trained by doing a small number of approximately 1/2 or 1/3 sized practices (maybe three or so), and more regular shorter runs (1-10 climbs) at fast pace. 
• The route was a standard 5.7 grade for most of my training (including when I unofficially beat the records), with Rock management kindly agreeing to keep the route up for several months for me. For the final attempt, we added holds to make the finish at the top of the wall, and changed three other holds to easier ones. (Guinness has no route grade requirements.) 
• A Kindle Fire running a pre-release version of my Giant Stopwatch app provided unofficial timing for audience to see and for my pacing. I had to modify the app to have a periodic beep to meet Guinness's requirements of an audible stop signal.
• I climbed in sets of 10. The planned pace was 8:18 per set and a 44-45 second rest between sets (clock runs during rests,), averaging at 49.8 seconds per climb including descent. I was always ahead of pace, and I occasionally took a mini break at the mid-point time if I was too far ahead.
• On the ground there was a sheet of paper with the start and end times of each break printed in large letters (calculated by this script), as well as the mid-point time for each set of 10 to keep me better on pace. 
• I wore moderately worn (one small hole) and comfortable 5.10 Anasazi shoes, a Camp USA Energy harness, shorts and a T-shirt. (I have not received any sponsorship.) My belayer used a tube-style device and wore belay gloves.
• In the morning I stress-baked pumpkin muffins for myself and the volunteers. I had the muffins, water and loose chalk on a table for use during breaks.
• About half-way through, I ducked into the storage area inside the rock and changed to a dry shirt. 
• Most of my practice was with an auto-belay, and at a shorter distance per climb (and hence greater number of climbs needed) since the auto-belay makes it impossible to get to the top of the wall. The auto-belay is also spring loaded so it effectively decreases body weight (by 7 lbs at the bottom according to my measurement). Then a couple of weeks ago the auto-belay was closed by management due to a maintenance issue, and I had a break in training until the Wednesday before the official attempt when I trained with a manual belay. 
• Since Guinness requires video proof in addition to human witnesses, in the interests of redundancy, I had three cameras pointed at the attempt. The best footage (above) is from a Sony A7R2 with a zoom lens at 16mm, producing 1080P at 59.94 fps. Video was processed with Adobe Premiere Rush. The processing consisted of trimming the start and end, and adding a timing video track I generated with a Python OpenCV2 script, synchronized with single-frame precision at the 1:00:00 point with the footage of Giant Stopwatch (barely visible under the table towards the end of the video; early in the video, glare hides it). For the unofficial version I link above, I accelerated the middle climbs 10X in Premiere Rush.

The good of competent achievement

One of the ways we flourish is by achievement: by successfully fulfilling a plan of action and getting the intended end. But it seems that there is a further thing here of some philosophical interest: we can distinguish achievement from competent achievement.

For me, the phenomenon shows up most clearly when I engage in (indoor) rock climbing. In the case of a difficult route, I first have to try multiple times before I can “send” the route, i.e., climb it correctly with no falls. That is an achievement. But often that first send is pretty sketchy in that it includes moves where it was a matter of chance whether I would get the move or fall. I happened to get it, but next time I do it, I might not. There is something unsatisfying about the randomness here, even though technically speaking I have achieved the goal.

There is then a further step in mastery where with further practice, I not only happened to get the moves right, but do so competently and reliably. And while there is an intense jolt of pleasure at the initial sketchy achievement, there is a kind of less intense but steadier pleasure at competent achievement. Similar things show up in other physical pursuits: there is the first time one can do n pull-ups, and that’s delightful, but there is there time when one can do n pull-ups whenever one wants to, and that has a different kind of pleasure. Video games can afford a similar kind of pleasure.

That said, eventually the joy of competent achievement fades, too, when one’s skill level rises far enough above it. I can with competence and reliability run a 15 minute mile, but there is no joy in that, because it is too easy. It seems that what we enjoy here has a tension to it: competent achievement of something that is still fairly hard for us. There is also a kind of enjoyment of competent achievement of something that is hard for others but easy for us, but that doesn’t feel quite so virtuous.

There is a pleasure for others in watching an athlete doing something effortlessly (which is quite different from “they make it look effortless”, when in fact we may know that there is quite a bit of effort in it), but I think the hedonic sweet spot for the athlete does not lie in the effortless performance, but in a competent but still challenging performance.

And here is a puzzle. God’s omnipotence not only makes God capable of everything, but makes God capable of doing everything easily. Insofar as we are in the image and likeness of God, it would seem that the completely effortless should be the greater good for us than the challenging. Maybe, though, the fact that our achievements are infinitely below God’s activity imposes on our lives a temporal structure of striving for greater achievements that makes the completely effortless a sign that we haven’t pushed ourselves enough.

All this stuff, of course, mirrors familiar debates between Kantians and virtue ethicists about moral worth.

Hangboard build

With our climbing gym still closed, I made a hangboard for myself and my son, a quick and inferior clone of the Lyons Edge Hideout. My build instructions are here (with kind permission from Lyons Edge).